


Help You

by CrashDevil (cjdevlin19)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Suicide Attempt, divine intervention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 09:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15116951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjdevlin19/pseuds/CrashDevil
Summary: Chuck helps a background character.Written for mrswhoseewhatsis' Louden Swain and Station Breaks inspired fics. Inspired by 'Help You' by the AMAZING band Louden Swain.





	Help You

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry this was almost late. Ironically, I had trouble with the ending.

Chuck liked watching the background people. The characters that he never wrote. The people who may have been impacted by events he wrote into being, but who mostly,  _mostly_ , grew unchecked, unnoticed, each one a world of character development thriving without the author's direct influence. Writing Sam and Dean, the Supernatural series, that had been fun and dramatic, but there was nothing as satisfying as watching some Jane or John making right choices. 

Background people making background choices that don't affect the main story line, at all. Yet, they make them, because it affects  _their_  story line. Something so small and insignificant, but powerful enough to distract the Light. Small and insignificant like climbing over the railing on a bridge and throwing themselves over. Usually, Chuck didn't notice, didn't stop it, didn't mourn a loss of life, but sometimes he appeared on the other side of the railing and looked down at the river raging below. 

"Wow. That is a long way down." He commented, quietly.

"Where the hell did you come from?" The woman asked, 

"Ah, that doesn't matter. Where'd you come from?" Chuck asked.

"Uh... New Orl'ens." She answered, shaking her head.

"I'm kinda from, well, everywhere, but... My name's Chuck. What's your name?"

She closed her eyes. "Shelly. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm kinda busy, so-"

"Yeah, no, I get it. You're trying to kill yourself, but if you're about to hit a river at terminal velocity, what's the harm in a friendly conversation before you go?"

Shelly blinked and turned to him, hands grasping the railing. "If you think you're gonna talk me out of this-"

"Why would try to talk you out of it? You've obviously thought it through. You've picked a place, you've probably written your note, you've probably done everything except pray for forgiveness. Nah, I don't wanna talk you out of it. Just wanna talk."

"Wha-what about?" 

"I dunno. Maybe... the big question. Why?"

Chuck could almost  _hear_  her swallow, nervously. "Be-because it's... it's just too much. Nothing ever changes."

"What does that mean?"

"I thought that I... I had grown and become a better person, but I'm not. I'm exactly the same person I was in high school and so's he."

"Who's 'he'?"

"My husband. I mean, my ex-husband. Cheating bastard. He cheated back then, too, back in high school, and before you get ideas, I'm not doing this because of him. He doesn't control me, anymore."

"But he did?"

"God! Only our whole relationship." Shelly chuckled, without any joy. "I married him straight out of high school. He  _cheated_ on me senior year, but I still married him because who else would have me?!"

Chuck's eyes implored her to continue, but he didn't say anything, now. "He was my first, my  _only_  relationship. No one looks at me the way he pretended to. I'm... still stupid, still fat, still ugly. That's not going anywhere. I fucked my life up before I was even out of my teens and being controlled, was that really worse than being alone?" There was silence as she looked from the river to her uninvited witness. "I'm not being rhetorical, Chuck. I spent 10 years on him; I'm almost 30, that's a third of my life, and what do I have to show for it? Just scars... emotional and physical."

"I thought you weren't doing this because of him?"

"This isn't some attention-grab!" Shelly exclaimed, a tear rolling from her left eye, chased quickly by one from her right, which met at her chin.

"That's not what I said. I said it seems like you're doing this because of your ex, and before you start shouting, I don't see anything wrong in that statement. He controlled you for a third of your life. Your comings and goings, your appearance, your sleep schedule, even your  _laugh_ , and now he's gone and you don't know who you are without him. You think things don't change because you weren't allowed to grow over the last decade." Shelly turned to him, shocked wet eyes on him, but Chuck was looking at the river again.

"You've tried to be a person, again, without him, but the only other person you've been was you at 16 years old. you don't know how to be almost 30 and your own person again, so you don't sleep; you just close your eyes and dream it went a different way."

"How do you know that?"

"The circles under your eyes. The ones you think will disappear after you've been awake for awhile, but they don't."

"No... how did you know he censored my laugh?" He could barely hear her voice.

"I'm a writer. It's my job to know how people think, react, evolve."

"You're a writer?" Shelly asked, shimmying slightly closer to him. "I've always wanted to be a writer. Is it-"

"It's hard. I won't lie. Endings are the hardest to write. Anybody can shit out a beginning but an ending? A good ending, with limited plot holes, one that leaves the reader satisfied, that is like finding the Holy Grail. Sometimes, you write a perfect ' _Dreamcatcher_ ' ending and sometimes you fuck around and release a ' _Dark Tower_ ' ending so bad you have to write a disclaimer into the last chapter telling people to stop reading if they don't want to be pissed off. Endings suck."

Shelly's eyes lit up a bit. "I love Stephen King. ' _Dreamcatcher_ ' is one of my favorite books."

"It's a travesty, what they did to that story in the movie."

"That ending pissed me off." Shelly let out an airy chuckle. "Guess endings  _are_  hard."

Chuck nodded, scooting slightly closer to her. "Is this really the way you want your play to end? I'm sure it wasn't meant to be a two-act, Shelly." Shelly looked down, between her feet on the outside of the bridge, at the river below. "It's completely up to you, but give it a chance to get to the climax, sweetheart. Just stick around for just another day. Help me help you."

"Why do you even  _want_  to help me?" She asked, quietly, looking up at him.

"Because your ending sucks. 'Shelly throws herself off a bridge' is a worse ending than 'Duddits was an alien who saved the world through alien fisticuffs'. If I wrote this into one of my books, my fans would burn it." Chuck shrugged. " _My_  fans kinda hate everything I write. I don't know if I should even call them 'fans'. Eh, you can't please everybody." Chuck smiled at her and there was something indescribably warm about the smile. "We can rewrite your ending, Shelly, right here and now. What do you say?"

She looked down as he offered his hand. "How do you know the new ending would be any better than this one?"

"I don't... and isn't that neat?" Chuck reached his hand closer to her. "That's the point, to not know."

Shelly sighed, deeply, as she took Chuck's hand and used it as leverage as she swung her leg over the railing and climbed over to stand in front of him. "Thanks."

"You're welcome. Why don't we go have a cup of coffee, Shelly, my treat? We can talk about writing. I'd love to hear the stories you've got locked up in that brain of yours."

"This is a 'don't leave the suicidal chick alone' thing, isn't it? You don't have to-"

"I don't know what you're talking about. I just want to hear the stories rattling around inside that head. Maybe I'll steal your ideas, put together a new series. One that just runs forever, new novel after new novel, like ' _Discworld_ '."

"Aww. I love ' _Discworld_ '. Terry Pratchett was a god."

Chuck snorted. "Not quite. But he was definitely a better writer than me. My personification of Death wasn't as good as his, which kinda pisses me off 'cause he did a classic grim and I did, like, more of a 'Man in Black' pale rider thing."

"Yeah, but did your Death ever fill in for Santa? 'cause it was less the design of Pratchett's Death that made him awesome and more the personality of him." Shelly started walking off toward the place where she'd parked her car.

"Yeah, mine's a know-it-all junk food addict." Chuck said, following her. "The first scene with him is in a Chicago pizzeria, extolling on the superiority of deep-dish pizza and talking about how he's older than God."

"Older than God?"

"Yeah and that he's gonna reap God in the end. Arrogant mo-fo."

"But that could be endearing. Depending on how it's written."

"Yeah, my fans seemed to like him. Well, they definitely liked his interaction with one of the main characters."

"So, what have you written? Anything I might have-"

"Nah. You haven't read any of my work." He said, with certainty. "The series that got the most circulation was called 'Supernatural', about these two brothers who hunt demons and monsters, save the world. Then I did this one called 'Revolution', a post-apocalyptic America thing, but it didn't go anywhere. Couldn't get publisher interest. I'm thinking about doing one about time travel."

"Yeah? What's your fresh take on time travel?" Shelly asked, stepping up to her car door.

"Who says it needs a fresh take? You do a thing well, it doesn't need to be new. Classics are classics for a reason." Chuck stopped at her passenger door and looked over the roof at her. He was waiting for her to acknowledge that they were going to get coffee together. Maybe she'd surprise him, tell him she wasn't interested in his coffee.

"Well? Get in." Shelly demanded, opening her door and sliding into the driver's seat. She twisted her keys, which were hanging in the ignition, and started the car. Chuck smiled as he got in the passenger door. "Where to for coffee, Chuck?"

Chuck was never sure what made him stop watching the background people and talk to them. It was never a special person that he talked off the ledge, never someone he needed for the stories, but... sometimes he found himself looking down at a raging river to strike up a conversation with a hopeless person. Sometimes he brought a miracle to a person in the form of a listening ear. Sometimes he bought a background character coffee and lunch, and showed them his blog of cat pictures because what else was the internet for?

Sometimes Chuck took the time to let a background character write their own ending, because they deserve better than the one they thought he wrote for them... because endings are hard to write, but easy to change.


End file.
